The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

Envy is the basis of democracy.

Politics is the art of the possible.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.